Ben Marcus is the author of a 1995 book of experimental short stories called The Age of Wire and String, and the 2002 novel Notable American Women. In his new novel, The Flame Alphabet, a deadly illness caused by language – in particular the language of children – is spreading across America.

Language can be dangerous but in your new novel it becomes physically harmful. How did the idea come to you?

It had been haunting me for a few years and I'd flirted with it in earlier books. In one story I wrote, someone was filling a room with language through a speech tube so that the man inside would burst from the pressure. It took me a long time to figure out just how I would build a book around it.

What was the solution?

I started to think about a family at the centre of it, and working with the tensions that exist within a family that already has a language problem. I wanted to write a very human story, and to resist writing yet another conceptual book that might have been philosophically intriguing but cold. The dilemma faced by the narrator, Sam, is whether to stay at home with a daughter who might kill him, or leave her and feel humiliated for having abandoned his family. The idea of crashing a domestic story into something so very fantastical appealed to me.

With a young family of your own, it must have been strange to write about such a painful separation between parent and child.

It was. When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level. Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.

No matter how bad it gets in the novel, it always seems as if something else is lurking around the corner.

I'm an enormous fan of Thomas Bernhard's books and I like the relentless feeling in his work – the pursuit of darkness, the negative – and I think in some sense I've internalised that as what one is supposed to do. It is such a deep value system of mine that now I'm quite concerned about it. I get concerned if it seems like I'm doing things too much or habitually examining them.

Did the book take a long time to write?

Actually I wrote it very quickly. My day job is as a teacher in New York [Marcus is a creative writing professor at Columbia] and I had earned a year off and was determined to get most of it done during that time. It was an enjoyable book to write in a lot of ways.

What's your writing routine?

I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife's a writer too and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids. Now that I have more demands on my time, I'm much more aware of how valuable it is. I really do try to jump right in.

In a 2005 Harper's essay, reacting to comments by Jonathan Franzen, you expressed concern about the state of experimental literature in the US. Have things improved since then?

Franzen had said that a certain kind of writing was damaging the prospects of literature, and that given that there are so few readers we shouldn't scare them off with experimental fiction. I just wanted to suggest that this kind of work can be healthy, and it's certainly not depriving anyone else of readers.

Writers are always wishing to be taken more seriously, but lately I find myself thinking that it's the writer's job to earn this conversation, that the writing itself has to draw people to it and make them want to discuss it. We can't expect there to simply be a rote interest in anything artistic out of some ancient sense of duty to the beautiful. That's how I feel today. Tomorrow, when I see more reviews, I'll may feel differently.

What are you working on now?

I'm just finishing a collection of short stories. It's going to come out some time next summer in the States and Granta will publish it in the UK some time after that. I always tell myself this next one won't be fantastical and will be very plain and believable, but I don't know why I tell myself that because I don't ever seem to listen.